The Screen: An Old-Fashioned Chiller:Julie Harris and Claire Bloom in 'Haunting'

By BOSLEY CROWTHER

Published: September 19, 1963

"SCANDAL! Murder! Insanity! Suicide! Hill House has everything!" So boasts an off-screen narrator as we pan in to gaze upon a shadowy and gaunt New England mansion that looks for all the world like the old Jefferson Market Courthouse in Greenwich Village at the beginning of the film called "The Haunting," which came to the Paramount and Cinema I yesterday.

And, believe me, before this antique chiller drags to an ectoplasmic end, you'll agree that it does have just about everything in the old-fashioned blood-chilling line except a line of reasoning that makes a degree of sense.

It is great as long as Julie Harris and Claire Bloom are huddling in a room in that luridly off-kilter mansion, hugging each other in the dark and listening to horrible noises—thuds, screams, gun-fire—outside their door, waiting in paralyzed terror for they know not what.

And it seems to be getting someplace when Richard Johnson, as a cheery scientist who has brought a few people together in this presumably haunted house to study psychic phenomena, chases Miss Harris up a spiral stairway when she, poor thing, has given alarming evidence of going understandably mad.

Surely, there must be some significance, some psychic symbolism in this act. (You see, after watching all those pictures at the Film Festival, I'm looking for symbolism in everything.)

But no, there is really no point to it, other than getting Miss Harris away up there on a rickety little balcony, from which she almost falls. It is simply another maneuver to make your blood run cold. And that's the total purpose of the picture, as nearly as I can see.

Some clear intimations that Miss Harris is obsessed by the notion that she killed her mother might remotely explain why she has hallucinations, hears noises and all that sort of thing. But Miss Bloom also hears them, and she doesn't seem to be obsessed, except perhaps by a disposition to hug Miss Harris as often as she can.

Mr. Johnson also hears them, and so does Russ Tamblyn, a wise-cracking college student, who is the fourth in this game of "find the spook."

So it looks as though this film simply makes more goose pimples than sense, which is rather surprising and disappointing for a picture with two such actresses, who are very good all the way through it, and produced and directed by the able Robert Wise.